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AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon Redshift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 16, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.2%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.2%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Ved Prakash Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Works as a data warehouse system and collects data from different sources
In terms of improvement, I believe Amazon Redshift could work on reducing its costs, as they tend to increase significantly. Additionally, there are occasional issues with nodes going down, which can be problematic. We often encounter issues like someone dropping a column or changing the order of columns, which can cause synchronization problems when pushing data through our pipeline. It's a minor issue, but it can be annoying.
Ramesh Raghavan - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized repository, offers various cataloging mechanisms for quick data retrieval but data governance capabilities could be better
There are a couple of areas for improvement with Lake Formation. One of the main challenges, especially when dealing with rich media content, like in MarTech (Marketing Technology) or ad agencies, is its versatility. Some clients feel that Lake Formation doesn’t meet their needs and they tend to prefer competitor products for those specific use cases. The second area for improvement is in data governance. Specifically, Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance. This includes managing the entire data lineage—where the data originated, how it moves, and where it’s currently stored. The visibility of the data as it evolves is crucial, and that’s where more advanced governance capabilities would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Though Amazon Redshift is good, it depends on what kind of business you're trying to do, what type of analytics you need, and how much data you have."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability, as it grows according to our needs."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down."
"Redshift COPY command, because much of my work involved helping customers migrate large amounts of data into Redshift."
"With the APIs that are available, it can be easily integrated with other tools."
"Amazon Redshift is very fast. It has really good response times. It's very user-friendly."
"I am satisfied with the performance of the product."
"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
 

Cons

"Amazon should provide more cloud-native tools that can integrate with Redshift like Microsoft's development tools for Azure."
"The refreshment rate of data reaching Redshift from other sources should be faster."
"The product could be improved by making it more flexible."
"It takes a lot of time to ingest and update the data."
"Amazon Redshift does not work alone and requires integration with other AWS tools like S3 and Glue for a complete ecosystem."
"In our experiments, the handling of unstructured data was not very smooth."
"Pricing needs improvement as the solution is expensive."
"Should be made available across zones, like other Multi-AZ solutions."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"It falls short when it comes to more granular access control, such as cell-level or row-level entitlements which is a significant drawback for organizations that require precise control over who can access specific rows of data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing for Amazon Redshift is reasonable, though it could be somewhat higher than other solutions, such as Azure. Still, when you base your comparison on the services offered and the pricing, it's the most reasonable versus its competitors, such as RDS."
"It is an expensive product."
"Per hour pricing is helpful to keep the costs of a pilot down, but long-term retention is expensive."
"One of my customers went with Google Big Query over Redshift because it was significantly cheaper for their project."
"The product is cheap considering what it provides; I rate it five out of five for affordability."
"My customers have implementations that cost about $500 a month for a very small one. I also have a customer with a monthly invoice of about $25,000 USD."
"I have heard complaints about the solution’s pricing, and thus I rate it as a five."
"The price of the solution is reasonable. According to the RA3 cluster particularly, it provides 128 GB of storage with only four nodes. If you can manage your computations processes with the help of materialized views and proper queries. I think the IP clusters are very useful and overall fair for the price."
"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
64%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
What do you like most about AWS Lake Formation?
It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
The pricing is expensive compared to OpenStack, but cheaper than other cloud environments. It's middle-of-the-road for regular storage yet very cost-effective when using Amazon Glacier for data.
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker. I would have built-in functions that provide statistics for the data when using the GUI, such as SageMaker Insig...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon Redshift and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.